Samuel Tamposi, 70, Real Estate Developer, Dies

By KENNETH N. GILPIN

Published: May 27, 1995

Samuel A. Tamposi, who rose from modest beginnings as a farmer and vacuum cleaner salesman to become New Hampshire's largest commercial real estate developer, died at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston on Thursday. He was 70 and lived in Nashua, N.H., and Hernando, Fla.

The cause of death was lymphoma, said his son, Samuel A. Tamposi Jr.

The son of Romanian immigrants, Mr. Tamposi was born in Nashua and raised on the family farm.

After graduating from high school, he began his career selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners door to door. After several years as a salesman, he began buying up vacant Nashua mill buildings, factories and farmland, including some parcels that sold for as little as $7 an acre.

Those purchases were the foundation of a real estate empire that at his death stretched from New Hampshire to Florida.

"He was a man who grew up very poor and had a great love of the land," said former Senator Warren B. Rudman, one of many New Hampshire Republicans to whom Mr. Tamposi contributed during his lifetime. "He loved to build things, things that would be of value."

Mr. Tamposi made his fortune buying and selling land and persuading Fortune 500 companies like Anheuser-Busch, Digital Equipment and Raytheon to build plants in New Hampshire.

Mr. Rudman said yesterday that Mr. Tamposi "brought more jobs to New Hampshire than all of the economic authorities in all of the state's cities and townships put together."

Mr. Tamposi's other great interest was baseball. He was a limited partner in the Boston Red Sox, rarely missing a home game and occasionally traveling with the team.

In the late 1960's Mr. Tamposi enlisted the help of Ted Williams, the Red Sox star, in the development of Citrus Hills in Florida, a 15,000-acre tract about 75 miles north of Tampa.

The project was little more than watermelon fields and thick forest when Mr. Tamposi and a partner acquired it in 1968, but now it has two golf courses designed by Arnold Palmer and more than 2,500 houses.

In addition to Mr. Rudman, the list of Republicans Mr. Tamposi backed includes former President George Bush and John H. Sununu, who was New Hampshire's Governor before joining the Bush Administration in 1989 as White House chief of staff.

During the Bush Administration, Mr. Tamposi's daughter, Elizabeth M. Tamposi, was head of the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, which issues passports and visas. During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ms. Tamposi supervised a search of the passport records of Bill Clinton, an action that generated considerable controversy and led to her dismissal.

In addition to his children Elizabeth and Samuel, who live in Nashua, Mr. Tamposi is survived by his wife, the former Eileen Maloney; four other children, Michael A., of Nashua, Nicholas E., of West Palm Beach, Fla., Celina Tamposi Griffin of Bedford, N.H., and Stephen A., of Hernando, Fla.; three stepchildren and 19 grandchildren.

The stepchildren are Richard M. Doyle, Jr. of Boston; Charles R. Doyle of San Francisco and Katharine S. Doyle of Nashua.

Mr. Tamposi's first marriage, to the former Barbara St. Pierre of Nashua and Palm Beach, Fla., ended in divorce in 1986.